Values

I got to thinking about the concept of values reading a book called The Mastery of Movement by theatre director Rudolph Laban.  The book is a technical manual on understanding movement for the purposes of acting, miming movements as a method of communicating to an audience ideas action and intent.  In addition to being renowned in theatre, his concepts are also used in Psychology by researchers studying body language, as he has a detailed, codified system of explaining movement that I still don’t comfortably understand.

In context, Laban talks about values as being important to understanding and portraying a character, because people strive after things that have value to them, and so those values create motivations to expend effort and orient their behavior in that direction.  Understanding what that character values affects the movements that person will take, direction, facing, and how they will treat people.  Desire for value also precipitates conflict, either internal conflict within themselves between contradictory values or the values of society, and external conflicts between two or more people.  If you observe the conflicts between two people or groups, that can give you information about what values those people hold, and what their goals are regarding the values they are attempting to achieve or uphold. 

In the context of theatre, values that audience members observe by actor movement and actions can evoke emotion or a partisan perspective in the person viewing.  Sympathy, antipathy or apathy are all possible when the actor communicates his character, but is dependant on whether the observer can relate to the experience based on their own life.  Of course, I think the goal of any art is to evoke any combination of strong emotions in the spectator, and so the audience needs to be taken in to consideration before any kind of presentation, in that they should be able to relate to it in some way.

A personality can change temporarily on the path to advancement towards a value.  For example, a gentleman can be harsh in dealing with a particular difficulty, or a talkative person may become silent around of certain people.  However their personality will eventually revert to their ‘true’ personality as they progress towards their value or the situation changes and they can no longer advance towards the value, or perhaps temporary resolution of the conflict supersedes direct advancement toward the value.

Inner attitudes, based on the values an individual or character holds, are most visible in small areas of the body, sometimes only barely visible, but is especially obvious in the eyes.  People often feel the need to be deceptive so any obvious movements could be disguised or omitted, except in pro deceivers it will still be visible by micro expressions most often in the eyes and face.  A good example of this is a drug addict, one of the most stigmatized stereotypes in our culture.  A junkie may be a good liar, tell you they need money for something else or explain away their looks or behavior as not being caused by addiction but instead some other plausible reason.  However, when presented with their drug of choice, the addict’s eyes will fix on the drug and follow it if it moves around without being aware they are doing it.  This is what the person values, and society is critical of it for being a petty, shallow, self-destructive value compared to more highly held values like power, wealth, fame.  This is also where the seven deadly sins of Christian ethics comes from (gluttony, sex, sloth, etc), because repeated sin is believed to destroy the grace and charity within a person.  The person’s worth in society is relative to how able they are to be useful or beneficial within that society, and the incorporeal ‘body’ of society are the values that are taken for granted by the average person as common knowledge and natural.  People immersed in sin are in a poor position to help others, because that value erodes the value of charity.

This got me thinking about present day examples.  What are the values held by someone who is using their cell phone all the time?  Do they value social contact, or is it a narcissistic appeal that they have more control over the social experience in that it will be more oriented about them or their needs?  Maybe not as overt as the seven sins, narcissism was alluded to in recent interpretation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow theory of the Hierarchy of Needs.  As you proceed higher and higher up the list, that is most of your basic needs fulfilled such as food, shelter, security, being loved, there could be a dark side toward self-actualization, as many physical needs are met people turn inward in a sense, and perhaps they become less motivated.  Maybe not everyone has the tools or the capacity to become self-actualized, and instead they stall out part way up the hierarchy and, having no apparent motivation, fixate on themselves, in a particular way, as the only value that remains in their life.

Apophenia

I find there are very rare chances in my day to day life to meet a really crazy person.  Sure, Victoria is full of the homeless and lots of drug addiction of course, but it’s not the same.  Of course where I work downtown lots of disheveled shuffle past, making random noises or half walking half dancing from the crack rock, but if movies and TV have taught me anything about mental illness it is just not quite the same.  And what makes mental illness even more interesting is the cultural context totally affects how people in that culture interact with them.  In some cultures people who mutter, hear voices, or have other collections of behaviors that set them apart from the average person are revered or treated as touched by divine or supernatural forces, or just generally treated special in some way.  In North American Eurocentric culture however they are treated as having a maladaptive problem that must be dealt with, like back pain or high cholesterol.

Of course this involves drug related treatment, and it seems like our society is at the point where any abnormalities or behaviors that don’t fit the norm need to be medicated, either at doctor direction or desired by the patient themselves.  And let’s be clear, this is the same culture that has normalized people imitating The Jersey Shore.  I guess having excessive over tanned skin and ugly haircuts isn’t enough to have someone committed to a mental hospital.  Ultimately, as with most other illnesses, it is more important that you are socially functional than any other sort of problems, mental or physical.  Being productive, having a job and some sort of friends and family life need to be hindered in some way before anything can be considered problematic.  This is probably why prohibition was revoked, and why many people choose to self-medicate, because as long as you can hold down a job and aren’t beating your wife, nobody cares enough beyond that how well you are doing or how you feel about this life you’ve been thrust in to.  How many functional alcoholics do you know?  There are few fates worse than not being able to fit in or get along with people around you, which is probably why people will do whatever it takes to change themselves, including self-medicating.  Even homeless people value their relationships with their fellow peers, and I’m sure some people who are addicted to hard drugs do them because it makes them feel like they can fit in, or at least participate in their subculture on some level.

The internet probably maintains the best chance for having an interaction with a sincere, down to earth Lovecraft style crazy person, since neither you nor they have to leave the house for this to happen.  And while if you spend a lot of time online you might be lead to think our civilization is at the apex of crazy people, I would guess this isn’t actually so, since people are just more apt to be open about their craziness online.  I’m sure many people have enough intelligence and discipline to confine their personality quirks online, and come across as perfectly normal when face to face. 

Recently though while reading recent Psychology literature on Emotional Intelligence I came across a term I’ve never heard before called Apophenia.  This is a condition in the scientific grey area of crazy-but-not-quite-diagnosis-crazy, studied in the context of the more extreme version as schizophrenia, described as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.  A good example of this would be conspiracy theorists like 9-11 truthers, or Jim Carry in the movie The Number 23.  Like many constructs of psychology, this can have a wide spectrum of implication, and taken to extremes, can make a person’s lives problematic.  In my mind this seems to relate back to the problem of thinking you are unique, special or especially lucky, such as gamblers who think they can see the pattern in games of chance or finding images of the Virgin Mary in water stains and chicken nuggets.  Taken to a less harmful extreme are people like film students, who (in my personal favorite example) interpret a movie like The Exorcist as being some sort of metaphor for homosexuality, where two male ‘lovers’ exorcise the female from their lives, with the possessed girl being a corrupt, physically ugly being of power trying to confuse and control them.  While this is a fascinating interpretation, neither the writer nor movie director had any intention of making this the underlying theme of the movie. 

There has been some interesting research in apophenia, such as a study by Mintz and Alpert (1972) where they found that 40% of non-clinical participants hear the song “White Christmas” when played white noise and given a simple suggestion, and that those who are prone to hallucinations are more likely to hear it.  Another study using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (basically rubbing powerful electronic magnets across your skull) found that stimulating the left lateral temporal cortex reduced the perception of meaningful information in noise, and since TMS has an inhibitory effect it is thought that this type of thinking originates in this area (Bell et al, 2007). 

Sure, by the strict definition of apophenia, overanalysis of what is going on around you may be a symptom, but I don’t think anyone would argue this is a mental illness…it’s creative thinking.  Creativity itself is just connecting two unrelated ideas, and forms the very basis for progress and new ways of thinking in human existence.  Really, everything we do as humans can be thought of as over interpretation…any other animals just seek food, shelter, mating and relaxation.  We are different in that we are constantly striving over mentally conjured ideals to give us purpose, but is that not just extreme over interpretation of the world around us compared to the lives of the lions and the tigers and the bears?  Apophenia drives us to philosophize a higher meaning and gives rise to more complex forms of humor – such as upping the ante in repetitious humor by making the joke progressively more convoluted and complex, tying in less and less related ideas until the joke does not even resemble itself.  Overthinking things just seems to be a component of creativity, and might just be its very essence.  Seeing things that aren’t there are, depending on the situation, both genius and madness, the very root of paranoid – the only thing that sets them apart is application – applying apophenia to engineering problems such as architecture, energy or food production can make you a wealthy, benevolent savior, but apply it to social relationships, government regulations, secret testing and political intrigue and you become a paranoid schizophrenic.  The difference, I suppose, is between the practical, physical, directly useful, vs. abstract social order and what are they up to and what really happened at this historical moment.  Taking history at face value is almost certainly not what actually happened, as we know that the victors write the history books, but for reasons that aren’t clear to me this is frowned on at large.  Is re-examination of social policy frowned on for some deep rooted genetic level reason, or has the idea just been pounded in to our heads for generations as to be seen as a natural belief of order?

While the treatment of mental illness has many beneficial applications and has been helpful to people…epilepsy comes to mind as a good example, I can’t help but think of how much creativity as a whole we are losing to overmedication and stigmatizing minor mental illness…things like strange art, bizarre new inventions and radical social theory.  While many people feel like the problems they struggle with daily like depression and anxiety strangle and stop them from leading full lives, these problematic states often lead to amazing novel ideas.

More Food Type Things Out To Kill You: Tofu and Distilled Water

I wouldn't call the people I work with health nuts, but food comes up often, possibly because we talk over lunch, or maybe the average person just cares more and more about what exactly it is we are all putting in our body.  Where in the past you just assumed that if something is marketed as edible it is actually food, many people understand that processed food is saturated with strange chemicals, flavors and preservatives that take a long term toll on your body, because, well, your body needs actual food and gets confused by the foreign objects it finds boiling down in your stomach juices and passing along down the magical water slide we call the intestinal tract.  Substituting sugar and vegetable oil for other more expensive or high calorie ingredients can take its toll on your body, and the organic/raw/unprocessed food revolution we are still in the midst of has wizened many people to at least a basic understanding of nutrition and eating better = feeling better.

Recently in conversation with 2 people I work with have separately brought two things that even the very healthy regard as staples: distilled water and processed soybean or tofu.  Let me tell you what I've just found out:

Tofu has all sorts of shit going on with it.  I've known for a long time that legumes (family of plants including beans, soy, peas, peanuts) have had it in for people, namely from the lectins they contain, proteins that bind to your intestines and block them from absorbing other nutrients, leading to malnutrition, diarrhea, nausea, bloating and so on if beans are not properly soaked and cooked.  Tofu, or soy in general, also contain phytohormones that mimic human hormones, particularly estrogen.  These fake estrogens have been linked to increases in breast cancer for women, and decreased testosterone production (feminization) in men.  Apparently soy products can also cause imbalance in Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, and perhaps even other hormone function as well, considering how little we actually understand hormone function.  According to this interview, the problem is that they don't ferment tofu in North America and so this is what is causing the problem.  In Asia, where they have eaten tofu for ages, the tofu is properly fermented so does not affect them.  Nevertheless, it is not really a problem as long as you eat tofu in modertation.

Distilled water holds a different problem...while the water has been purified of all the bad things that can be found in water, the distilling process also gets rid of all the minerals that are natural in spring water, for example.  Our body can absorb minerals from food, and other sources like multivitamins, but not to the same extent as vitamins that are already dissolved in water.  Drinking distilled water gets even worse than that...imagine water as being little containers that can hold bits of solids.  In distilled water those containers are empty, and water is ALWAYS trying to fill those containers.  That means when you drink distilled water, it is actually leaching minerals from your body and into the water, which gets flushed through your body faster than regular water.  This study from the World Health Organization reports that studies of distilled water on rats have negative effects on their digestive systems, and leads to increased water intake and more frequent urination.  According to the report, the most important loss of minerals is in calcium and magnesium, and distilled water should be remineralized to be considered safe drinking water.

There is no need to panic, in moderation neither of these things will kill you, only after a protracted period of time is it considered a health risk.  A varied diet can help you avoid particular problems with foods that are a known health problem, or even with foods that could be found problematic in the future.